Powerlifting has 3 big debates – squat depth, drugs and supportive equipment. The last one is what I want to discuss today. What follows is a quick and dirty history around powerlifting equipment as I know it, and where it is today. It’s not meant to be comprehensive, but to give a better idea as to what it is, how it works and why it’s not “cheating”.

EDIT: 1,400 words later, and “quick and dirty” should read “tedious and boring”

Let’s start with an analogy before looking at equipment on a lift by lift basis… Imagine you’re at a race track. You want to learn how to drive a car around a track and there’s 2 dudes there. One’s a Touring Car driver, he’s got awesome skills in his saloon car, perhaps a bit rough and ready but he can get around the track a hell of a lot faster than most. The other guy’s an F1 driver. He’s a master of taking the absolute limits of technology and extracting ever last little drop of speed and power out of it.Continue reading →

“I want to get toned” and “I want a six pack/abs” are probably the single most common thing any personal trainer, or anyone who spends a significant amount of time in a gym will hear. Everyone wants shortcuts and magic supplements – but they don’t exist.

Generally speaking, the only way you can do it is through diet modification and hard work, so…. most of you will probably stop reading here 😦

For those who REALLY want to make the change (ie the ones willing to put the work in and get the results, not the ones who want to boast to their friends how much they’re training and dieting without ever really pushing outside the comfort zone), here’s some quick tips:

Things that WON’T work:
-just taking protein/fat burner/hoping you’ll get lean without changing anything else
-running for hours on the treadmill without modifying your diet
-flat out not eating anything

Things that WILL work:
-adjusting your food intake to “real” food
-knowing how many kcals you need to take in on a daily basis to obtain fat loss, and sticking to it
-patience (you didn’t get fat overnight, you won’t get lean that way either)

So Christmas is upon us and it’s the time of year when people tend to add a little extra winter padding. It happens, try not to stress out about it. Here’s a few quick tips that might help you to minimise any damage over the season of indulgence…

1) Don’t be all or nothing – if you have a slice of cake, it doesn’t mean your day is over. Keep the rest of the day on track and eat well to make up for it.

2) Glycogen depletion and calorie partioning – train with higher volume and intensities in the days before a big event and run your carb intake down a bit so that when you do go out and party, most of the calories go towards replenshing the depleted energy stores in your body from hard training rather than onto your hips/bum/tum in the form of fat. This is the exact reason I’ve designed my 2011 Christmas FitCamp.

3) Consider a mini diet – similarly to point 2, if you know there’s a big feast coming up on Saturday, run your kcals and carb intake down for the week before so that your average weekly kcal intake comes in right were it should be (also start your meals with lots of meat and leafy green veg and eat ’til you’re full – it’ll stop you eating too much dessert).

Almost every girl who steps into the gym for the first time has the same concern when their trainer suggests a weights program – they’re going to ‘bulk up’ and become some muscular monster with chunky veins everywhere (sound familiar??). Nothing could be further from the truth. Weight, and particularly strength, training in conjunction with mobility and conditioning work will give you that toned body which you’re after. So let’s plough on and see why you shouldn’t fear weight training…

I give out about boards.ie quite a bit. There’s a lot wrong with it, and it breaks my heart at times. But every now and again I remember why I post there. I got this in a private message yesterday…

“I don’t post on the [boards.ie] health and fitness forum, but I read it everyday. I have been following the advice you give on weight training and especially on fitness training when it comes to training with a heart rate monitor. Anyway since I started following the advice you were giving others, I have lost two and a half stone and regained my place on the rugby team. It might seem odd to you but I credit my change in weight and fitness down to you shooting down the bullsh*t and putting up serious good advice in the various threads. Thanks I enjoy reading your advice”

It’s not going to be very often that you hear me refer to something Charles Poliquin says as a positive, but there’s at least one concept of his I really love – technical failure.

Reps stop counting once your form breaks down beyond a defined technical standard. For example, that’ll be bouncing or bum lifts on the bench, not breaking parallel with your squats, or not getting your chin over the bar for chin ups and pull ups.

This post was inspired by a question on the boards.ie fitness forum recently. A poster was having trouble increasing the number of pull ups and dips that they could do – they were stuck at 4 of each and going nowhere.

The biggest challenge for a beginner looking to increase their bodyweight strength numbers is that you can’t ‘work up’ to bodyweight in the same way as you would build up numbers with a barbell and dumbbells (unless you want to cut a limb or two off?!). If you were a 75kg guy looking for 5 reps with bodyweight on the bench press then you might start at 60kg and 12-15 reps and add weight and drop reps each week on the way to your target. Obviously if you’re a 75kg guy only able to do 4-5 pull ups, you can’t use that method because you can’t go below bodyweight.

So what to do…? Well you can partially deload your bodyweight with bands and work with higher reps that way – adjusting band tension to allow for more/less assistance, this is a favourite of Will Heffernans and from seeing the results its gotten both guys and girls, it’s a pretty damn good way of doing things.

The definition of “functional exercise” is what it produces, not what it looks like.

If you’re ever struggling to choose an exercise for a certain bodypart, ask yourself these two questions:
1) is it a multi joint compound movement?
2) is it done standing?

If the answer to both is “yes” – that’s probably the one to do. And if all the exercises you’re trying to choose between answer “yes” to both questions, pick the one you hate the most. You probably need to do it more anyway.

There’s exceptions (pull up variations and bench variations being the obvious ones), but it’s a good guideline to follow.